We Are Social: Tuesday Tune-Up #33

Welcome to your drawsome weekly round up of the top stories in social media, a finger painted top-twelve that won’t leave you guessing.

Without further adraw;

1. Australian Social Media stats – March 2012
Facebook grew by nearly 200,000 Australian users in March, though the surprising figure is the Myspace traffic, with nearly half a million visitors.

Room for Justin Timberlake to bring Sexy Back? We won’t cry him a river if not…

1. Facebook – 10,889,960 Australian users/accounts (up 186,800) – 13 million UAVs according to Google Adplanner. The difference between the user numbers and unique visitors is people probably logging in from multiple locations – home, school, work etc.
2. YouTube – 10,000,000 UAVs (down 1,000,000)
3. Blogspot – 4,000,000 (up 500,000)
4. LinkedIn – 2,100,000 (down 100,000)
5. Twitter – 1,600,000 (down 200,000)
6. WordPress.com – 1,600,000 (steady)
7. Google Plus – 1,289,940 (up approx 90,000 – Estimated calculation below)
8. Tumblr – 1,100,000 (steady)
9. Flickr – 840,000 (down 80,000)
10. MySpace – 470,000 (down 50,000)

2. Visualising the Australian digital revolution
Marketing Mag have put together a neat Infographic on Australia’s digital revolution between 2010 and 2011.

As expected, social media use is surging, up by 127% during 2011. Australians now spend 9.3 hours per week on social networks.

3. Spending on digital marketing continues to rise
According to a survey conducted by Duke University, US marketing budgets will rise by 8.1% over the coming twelve months.

This rise will mainly be spent online, with digital marketing budgets forecast to rise 12.8% over the next year, whilst ad spend on traditional media will drop by 0.8%.

The area which will rise most is social media: marketers said that they planned to allocate 7.4% of their overall budgets to social media in the coming year.

4. L’Oreal has a team of 400 staff working in social media
At Wednesday’s Facebook Marketing Conference in London, L’Oreal CMO Marc Menesguen revealed that L’Oreal has a team of 400 staff working in social media who post new content on Facebook everyday:

It’s a lot of work and requires a lot of commitment. The digital revolution is on at L’Oreal and we are integrating digital and social as early as possible in the marketing process.

5. Social media delivers higher value sales
New research has found that ecommerce sales which occur after exposure to a brand on social media deliver more than $280 per order, compared to less than $100 for those driven by natural search:

6. 10.5 billion minutes spent on Facebook daily, what’s Timeline’s effect?
According to a tidbit of info released by Facebook, in January users spent an average of 10.5 billion minutes on the site daily, excluding mobile – or around twelve and a half minutes each a day.

This increase has mainly come from a growth in the userbase: aggregate minutes per day increased 57% and average minutes per user per day increased 14% year-on-year.

Nonetheless, it’s unclear whether Timeline is driving a boost in engagement, in addition to the figures above.

Inside Facebook detailed a few studies which have been released about Timeline engagement rates, but the small sample size, coupled with the important caveat that most engagement takes place in the News Feed, means that it’s essentially impossible to draw a verifiable conclusion.

The most reliable study comes from Edgerank Checker, which has looked at over 3,500 Pages and they have struggled to find anything which suggests Timeline has a discernible impact on engagement.

7. Local Facebook Pages outperform global Pages in reach and engagement
New research has found that local Facebook Pages with 30-100 fans reach five times more fans (as a percentage) than corporate Pages with 100,000+ fans, with engagement eight times higher.

It goes to show that for businesses with multiple small branches – say, McDonalds – there’s value in having both a corporate Page, and a local Page for each store.

8. Tumblr hits 20 billion posts, integrate with Timeline
Although Tumblr has been very understated in its reaction to the news, the micro-blogging service has now reached 20 billion posts, meaning it’s doubled in size in just six months. Pretty staggering.

The platform has also finally been accepted as social graph partner by Facebook, meaning Tumblr posts can now be properly integrated into the Timeline, Newsfeed and Ticker.

Timeline integration has seen staggering traffic growth for launch partners such as The Guardian, so Tumblr is set to get even bigger. Pinterest who?

9. BBC News personalise content on their Facebook Page

As different people are interested in different news stories, BBC News have added a Control Panel which allows Facebook fans to filter which updates they see. By liking different BBC News sections, correspondents and programmes, more relevant updates will appear in your News Feed.

10. Heineken unveils bottle designed by two Facebook fans
Beer brand Heineken has released a limited edition bottle which was designed by Facebook fans. The competition asked fans to design a bottle and then pair it with another in the gallery, and it attracted 30,000 entries. Nice.

11. Spotify puts over 1,000 years of music on Facebook Timeline

Spotify have launched a really cool Facebook Timeline, which goes through 1,000 years of music history, and lets users discover some music they might otherwise have missed. On song.

12. Twitter user jailed for 56 days
A Welsh Twitter user who tweeted racist abuse about Fabrice Muamba, the footballer who collapsed on the pitch, was jailed for 56 days last week for inciting racial hatred.

That was our pick of the week’s social media news – what caught your eye? Leave a comment!